Adagio
by The Hart and Hound
Summary: Leaving slowly and stately. [All the doors are open, but Axel can't reach across the space to go through them. AxelRoxas]


Title: Adagio

Author: tsubaki-hana

Series: Kingdom Hearts

Rating: T

Disclaimer: Kingdom Hearts belongs to Square Enix and Disney.

Summary: Leaving slowly and stately. The doors are all open, but Axel can't reach across the space to go through. AxelRoxas.

* * *

_Memories are hallways of heavy shadows that stir your sleep;_

_they're only there to make you _

_sink._

* * *

It's an old song and dance between the two of them, this continuous battle of wills. Roxas wants to leave, Axel wants to stay, and never will these words change. They will grit their teeth and _clench_, break themselves before they ever change their minds. It is not so easy, this six-letter-word change, and Axel, who is both old and young in the stretch of time that he has existed, does not welcome what he can't feel with his own hands.

"It doesn't really matter where I go," says Roxas, offhanded and perhaps a bit too casual about it, like someone trying to convince himself that he is right. Axel feels the smile creep up his face, bitter and stiff as copper wire. It feels awkward on his face, and he turns his face away quickly.

"What is it?" asks Roxas, irritation written across his face.

"Nothing," says Axel, "except you don't sound as sure of yourself as you claim to be."

Roxas bristles, but does not allow himself to get angry. (_You catch this in the way he chews the corner of his mouth impatiently. His eyes are very dark in the hollows beneath his brows, and you don't look away, expecting something to reach out from there. Hands, perhaps._) Instead, he paces across the white stone of the floor noisily, willing his heels into the granite and lime. Roxas always tries to make more scuffs on the floor when he is feeling shallow bodied, as though the rubber streaks somehow assured him that he was there.

"I don't need to be certain, now do I? It really doesn't matter if I go or stay anyway, so why would it matter that much more if I knew where I was trying to be at all?" he asks.

"A clever riddle," Axel says, and smiles until he can feel the copper wire heat and bend underneath the force of his false grin. "Does it matter where you go when you have nowhere to be? Is that what you're asking? Because if it is, I don't give a damn. Go where it suits you. Not that you ever will. You always make plans and never go through with them."

Roxas doesn't take the bait.

"I might go somewhere bright," he says, as though Axel has never spoken at all. "You know, somewhere with many windows and mirrors and _openings_, something transparent. This place is so dark and crooked that you never feel that you've seen a whole room, like it's bent against understanding."

Axel has been in every and no room in the Nobodies stronghold, because like everything else about this place, it is never exactly the same. There are no rules by which the walls and floors abide, and they shift as they please until he feels very much like a small person in an infinite space. Roxas, who is not so tall as Axel and softer than the angles and shadows allow, looks like a small pale child at the horizon of an abyss.

Sometimes, that is why Axel grabs Roxas' hand. Easy to see but small enough to lose, as though shape and form would be enough to make him able to see Roxas no matter where he goes. (_Which isn't nearly as true as it is for you, with red hair and twist-tall arms and legs that you can reach for the edges of the spaces with. Roxas is quiet and pale and very quickly lost in the shades that you never quite know are there until the walls have changed again and you are alone with a solid something between the two of you._)

Axel grabs Roxas' hand now, and doesn't understand why Roxas only looks at him sadly, a sorry little white figure that's slipping away from his own gloved hand until Axel can't see him for the tears in his eyes.

* * *

Roxas does leave, which Axel fully expects and is even ready for when it finally happens. What he is not ready for is his own vacuous breathing when he watches Roxas walk past him and brush off his words like the snow Axel only half-remembers from their third mission together. (_It blinded you for but a moment, and you had spent a terrifying moment swinging your arms and trying to find something to hold onto. Roxas led you somewhere dark and never reappeared even after you could see again. You thought he might have been dissolved like smoke. That little fool never was completely attached to his body, now was he?_)

"I don't need him," he says, tracing the line of his gloves.

"Yes you do," says the shadow of what Axel knows is the infiltrator with the white hair and solemn tenor. Axel hates him, but only in the way that he hates himself. Here stands a man who didn't do something and is now paying the price. "Which is unfortunate, since he doesn't need you at all."

Axel smirks. "Yeah, well what the fuck do you know anyway?"

The other man is as still and silent as ever. Axel envies him his calm. His body is perfectly controlled, but for some reason he just can't seem to catch his breath. (_This is somehow important, since you don't think that you have real lungs in your current state. You've tried drowning before, not wholly on purpose but as a leg of a mission where you found yourself under ice and unable to surface. It's the only thing that frightens you more than snow, but even then, breathing is such a hard habit to break._)

"I should probably be doing something right now," says Axel.

"About me?" says the white-haired man.

"About something. I need to move, but I can't bring myself to do it, like it wouldn't matter either way." Axel smiles more cheekily than usual, until he can feel the wrinkles around the corners of his mouth. "_He'd_ probably tell me I was just depressed, melodramatic little shithead that he is. 'No one would miss me'...Shit, what a load of shit."

The other smiles as well, but in a way that makes something twist inside of him, bitter and cold and very lonely amidst what feels like a thousand years of wandering between people, being the only one without anyone to call his own. Axel can only remember the first day since his awakening as a nobody and the last couple before he joined the organization. Everything in between felt like air passing his ears. There had been noise and color and cold, but nothing that he could _feel_ any more strongly than his feet hitting the ground. It had been very grey when he first opened his eyes and decided that he would call them three-leaf-clover green (_because you're one leaf short of any manner of luck_).

You haven't walked as much as I have, Axel thinks, suddenly angry with the other. You haven't walked and still felt like you were in the same place, because unlike me and despite whatever you tell everyone else, you can be complete without someone else with you. And to this Axel feels his fists come together and shake until he feels what should bones and ligaments creak against each other.

"You here to make fun of me?" he asks, snorting and turning back towards the impressive not-towers of the castle behind him. "Because I want someone around? I sure don't need him, I can put my shoes on and go outdoors without anyone to hang onto me, if that's what you're wondering. So go bother someone else with your self-righteous drivel."

The other, looking not at him, but perhaps right above the place where his neck meets his shoulder, sighs and frowns. He seems disappointed, and with a childish ferocity, Axel beats the curiosity out of his mind until there is nothing left for him to feel at all. There's nothing interesting about this imposter at all.

"If that's what you really think," the man says, lightly, treading over eggshells and glass and all manner of other things that might have been valuable before someone ruined them with cold and not very careful hands. Somewhere down there, on whatever the man is stepping on, Axel thinks he might see something like the vulnerable look on his face when he said that he would actually miss something.

The imposter ruins a lot more for him than just his mood that night. He also makes sure that Roxas never will go to his bright place, and that Axel can never follow him to whatever half-light they have made to sit in its stead.

* * *

There are no walls now, everywhere he looks in the castle is now just a terrible inky blackness with no bounds. People walk in on his space on occasion, maybe tell him something, but other than that, there is nothing to indicate that any time has passed at all. Axel is not sent on missions any more. He is not trustworthy and he is not useful without Roxas. (_Which isn't really true, because he could fight if he felt there would be a reason to. The only problem is that now he just doesn't care at all._ )

"Roxas!" he finds himself yelling at some undistinguished time, because there are no clock hands or nighttimes to help him feel the passage of things anymore. If there are, then they are endless, and time has altogether stopped in favor of this sudden cold and open feeling. "ROXAS!"

He winces at the desperation in his voice, and calls out over and over and over and over... There are no echoes, no answers, not even a feeling of dimension that he knows that he would feel in an enclosed space. There is no Roxas here, Axel tells himself, there won't be any Roxas here because he has gone somewhere other than here and wherever that is, I am not welcome. This makes him angry, and he walks faster for a time until he feels cold again.

"Why the fuck do I even bother?" he asks himself one time, chewing his lip a rubbing his hair as though this will brush the not-frost that he sometimes imagines building on him. It is like that time again, that time between when he wakes and when he meets other people like him, only this time he is very aware of how empty this world is for him, and looks for a way to get out of here. "ROXAS!"

He will call out between the infrequent visits of the other people. He never calls when they are there, embarrassed by his own dependency on someone so little and insignificant amidst all those other people out there in the world that are capable of feeling more deeply than they are supposed to. He will wait until they have said what they want to say, put in the sly and greasy words where he feels they are necessary, and go back to walking his empty spaces. Axel is so very tired, but he will not go to sleep just yet.

The blackness is endless, and he is very thin and wavering with nothing to hold on to.

* * *

Axel feels somehow cheated when he finally does see Roxas again, when Xemnas appears and tells him to go retrieve his missing counterpart (_your other half, like a missing leg or eye_). It is not half as dramatic and stirring as he hopes it will be. He contrives an encounter with a brilliant conclusion, where there are hands and they are in his own and now he has something to make him whole again. But this isn't how it is at all, because now Roxas can't see him the way he sees Roxas.

The dark blue eyes are as clear and unclouded as ever, but now they are vacant, and Axel is not something inside of them. He's just a very tall man with unusual hair and a cocky smile, standing like a tower at the end of the platform now, no one special, perhaps someone to watch out for as an enemy.

Axel is never easily hurt. He laughs at most wounds, smiles at insults and sends them careening back with his wit, and is always one of the first standing again at the end of a bad fight.

Now, he swallows, squints against how painful that is, and tries not to let him feel more than he is supposed to. That is how Nobodies work, and that is how they keep working despite everything that might say otherwise. If he didn't make that distance himself, push off from this sudden hostile area between the two of them, Axel is afraid he will be back in that infinite pitch. He has to take Roxas back, has to now, before he ends up there again.

Any words between the two of them now are nowhere near important to him now. They may have passing moments in the space that has been artificed for Roxas' comfort, maybe even feel a tendril of that previous togetherness that has been gone for the past year, but they are not what matters.

"You're sending him off with a kiss and a wave, aren't you?" he asks Namine when he finally catches up to her in the plasticine trees in front of the mansion that is not a mansion at all. "Just like that, you're sending one of us off to disappear for some stupid kid," he says bitterly.

"Somehow I think that he prefers it that way," she says, calmly. He sometimes forgets how soft she looks, how utterly breakable and unreal she is. Everything matches, everything is harmonious, except for her, who shouldn't exist at all despite her perfect beauty.

Faults should show, he thinks. You don't exist, so something about you ought to be wrong.

"You mean to tell me he wants to top being his own person? Roxas, grumpy Roxas who wants to see windows and mirrors wants to just stop being anyone at all, no matter that he shouldn't?" Axel hears and feels his voice crack, but doesn't flinch like he normally would. He only smiles that copper smile until he feels it heat to the point of breaking into a frown.

"He wants to go somewhere," she says, running her pencil in pointless lines across paper. "I'd imagine that anywhere would be better than here. There are brighter places in the world than this after all."

Axel doesn't believe her.

Becoming someone else sounds like death, not like visiting.

* * *

The first time that Axel lays eyes on Sora, something inside him jerks loose, only halfway attached to whatever it is that makes him what he is. Sometimes, when he is very still, he thinks he might be able to feel it rattling around inside his bones, turning dusty and old inside of his cavernous chest. It is not particularly painful, this little something, because he is quite certain that he has imagined its presence to begin with and that something you cannot have cannot be properly missed.

Whatever it is, I have swallowed it, Axel thinks and he grins his Cheshire smile to an unsuspecting Sora who sees in him something other than what he is probably expecting. (_Something old, something new, something borrowed, something blue._) Whatever that thing broken and churning inside him will stay until the day that someone breaks him open and looks to see.

In this way, he feels a bit like an old locked box, and wonders who will be the first to pry his hinges off and look at him like a thing instead of the person he considers himself. Feeling particularly silly, he hopes they find nothing but sawdust and multicolored rubber bands, largely useless and partially colorful, much like himself.

Instead, he looks again at Sora and sees a facade between himself and what he knows to be on the other side. The bright blue eyes and baby face is the last real thing between himself and Roxas, where before there had been long stretches of hollows and curtains that had no ends between them. It is a kind face that the keyblade master has, but in that moment, there's nothing Axel wants to do more than rip it off and see if those darker eyes (_the ones that you had been hoping had been reaching out, you tell yourself_) are somewhere beneath.

But this is a door, a locked one, and until Axel finds the key, he knows that he will not be able to get in. For now, he will pound against it and listen to the rattle of something from inside of him. He can't reach it, even when he thinks he might know what it is, so all he can do is ram himself into this boundary between the two of them, feeling waifish and thin in this bright place.

(_There are walls and gates now, and you can't just reach out for help like last time._)

* * *

End

* * *

A/N: The result of several hours of listening to different variations of string quartets playing in funerary adagio. Comments and criticism are always welcome.


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